If a person has a hernia, they may suffer from pain, organ dysfunction, bowel obstruction, or other complications. This occurs when an organ protrudes through the wall that normally contains it. Hernias can occur in a number of parts of the body, and occur commonly in the abdomen. For example, the peritoneum that lines the abdomen may push out through a weakened area of the abdominal wall to form a small balloon-like sac. This can allow a loop of intestine or abdominal tissue to push into the sac.
One method of hernia repair involves using a surgical procedure known as laparoscopy to cover the hernia with a prosthetic mesh and fix it in place with fasteners. The fasteners are typically either sutures or specialized tacks that are delivered by a fastening device configured to reach into the abdominal cavity through an incision.
A surgeon makes a small incision in the skin and inserts surgical implements as well as a laparoscope—a small telescope with a camera attached. The surgeon uses the laparoscope to study the hernia and surrounding tissue of the abdominal wall. Naturally, the thickness of the layers of the abdominal wall varies from person to person and even from place to place within a patient. For example, the layers of fat may be thick or thin depending on a person's physical fitness. Unfortunately, there is no established method or device that allows a surgeon to fix a hernia mesh with fasteners having different penetration depths or sizes to accommodate the variation in thickness of the abdominal wall.
What is particularly problematic is that the shortcomings of current methods are associated with a risk of complications and patient pain. If the abdominal muscle wall is too thick due to obesity, the fasteners will not penetrate deeply enough, and the hernia mesh will not be fixed in place successfully. If the wall is to thin, the length of the fasteners poses a significant risk of pain and complications. Fasteners for the hernia mesh that protrude deeply into a patient's tissue exacerbate the patient's post-operative pain.